Anzac Day has always been connected with the Thai–Burma railway.
By a remarkable coincidence Australians in D force started work in the vicinity of Hellfire Pass on or very near 25 April 1943.
Despite their sickness and exhaustion Australian prisoners along the railway found the energy to commemorate the anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli in 1915. It was important for them to position their experience of war within the foundational national narrative of the Anzac ‘legend’. They had been defeated in 1942 but they could still display the qualities for which Australian soldiers were renowned — resourcefulness, laconic humour, endurance, courage and mateship.
Anzac Day 1944 saw four hundred men attending a service at Chungkai hospital camp near Kanchanaburi. After a minute’s silence the padre, according to the Australian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel E.E. ‘Weary’ Dunlop ‘gave us all a rocket that we only turn up to church in large numbers on this one day!’ He also forgot to mention the New Zealanders in his sermon — perhaps because there were so few New Zealanders taken prisoner by the Japanese